Solo Founder Startups Hit 36% of New Companies as Funding Lags

More than a third of new startups now have one founder

It has become normal to start a company alone, and the numbers back that up. Carta studied tens of thousands of U.S. startups for its 2025 Solo Founders Report. It found that the share of new companies with a single founder grew from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025.1 Carta's head of insights, Peter Walker, called the 13-point rise in about five years "a big shift." He linked it to technology making companies cheaper to create.1

The early number held up over the full year. Carta's Founder Ownership Report 2026, published in March, said about 36% of startups founded on Carta in 2025 were solo-led, up from 31% in 2024. The same report said the solo share has doubled over ten years.4 Other data points the same way. A fundraising guide citing Stripe Atlas said 63% of the C corporations Atlas incorporated in Q2 2026 were started by one person. It also put solo founders at 36 to 37% of new companies joining Carta in 2026.8

There are limits to what this shows. One analysis points out that the 2025 full-year figure comes from the same Carta team that produced the first report, so it is not an independent check. It also notes that Carta tracks cap tables, not revenue. The data shows how solo companies are owned and funded, but not how productive they are.4 The original report was also co-published by Solo Founders, a group that sells a paid program to solo founders and openly predicts solo founding will become "the default."4 The count itself looks solid. The story built around it deserves more caution.

Why it happened: AI took over the co-founder's building work

The coverage mostly agrees on the cause. Carta's report names AI as a main factor because it lets one person both build and sell.1 A detailed analysis from Startup Fortune makes the point more directly. Building the first version of a product used to be the main reason to find a technical co-founder. With AI coding assistants, one person can now do that over a weekend.5

The effects show up clearly in app stores. RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2026 covers more than 115,000 apps. It shows monthly launches of new subscription apps rising from about 2,000 in January 2022 to more than 14,700 by January 2026.24 AI-powered apps now make up 27.1% of that dataset and earn 41% more revenue per paying user in their first year.24 The tools behind this boom are growing fast too. App generator Lovable told TechCrunch it added $100 million in annualized revenue in one month in early 2026. It said users were shipping about 100,000 projects a day, and that it had passed a $500 million run rate by June.24

The job market may be pushing people as well. One commentary connects the solo boom to roughly 50,000 AI-linked job cuts in the first four months of 2026, citing Challenger, Gray & Christmas figures. It says many of those workers started their own businesses instead of job-hunting.13 That connection makes sense, but it rests on stories more than measured data.

The money: many products, a few big winners

The success stories are real. Most of them, though, come from founders who already had a large audience. Pieter Levels runs a portfolio including Nomad List, Remote OK and PhotoAI that is reported to earn more than $3 million a year with no employees. One account credits his 800,000-plus Twitter followers more than his code.15 Marc Lou passed $1 million in 2025 across products such as ShipFast and DataFast, and reported $78,000 across the portfolio in March 2026.15

There are quieter examples as well. Developer Sebastian Roehl made $602,000 in 2025, almost all of it from HabitKit, a habit tracker that charges $1 to $2 a month. By December 2025 it had 25,100 paying subscribers and $28,000 in monthly recurring revenue.22 Revenue tracker TrustMRR shows several founder-led tools with real, payment-verified income as of October 8, 2026: Postiz at $251,282 a month, POST BRIDGE at $48,915 and Web3Forms at $41,789.21

For most founders, the numbers look very different. In RevenueCat's data, only 17.3% of new subscription apps reach $1,000 a month in recurring revenue within two years. Just 4.6% ever reach $10,000.24 Apps launched in 2025 or later, the cohort built largely with AI coding tools, earn about 3% of all subscription revenue. Apps launched before 2020 still earn 69%.24 Industry estimates of what a typical solo operator earns disagree widely. One puts the median at $3,000 a month.27 Another, based on 847 income reports, puts median annual revenue at $94,000.28 These are not comparable data sets, and neither should be read as a census. Both point the same way, though: revenue is concentrated among a small number of winners.

In short, AI made building software cheap, but it did not make finding customers cheap. One builder-focused analysis notes that fewer than 3% of bootstrapped SaaS founders ever reach $1.2 million in annual recurring revenue.15 A Wall Street Journal-style roundup of solo operators adds an important caveat. One founder with a profitable credit-card app worries that the same AI tools make his product easy to copy. Another, who reached 100,000 users, says her existing industry network and reputation mattered more than the AI.17

Starting is easy; raising money is not

The biggest gap in the data is about funding. Solo-led companies were 30% of startups founded in 2024 but received only 14.7% of the cash raised in priced equity rounds that year.1 Solo founders were 35% of new 2024 incorporations on Carta but only 17% of companies that launched that year and closed a venture round by year's end.2 Carta's April 2026 pre-seed analysis found that 80% of companies that raised money at any stage in the prior year had more than one founder.2 Among startups that did raise venture funding in 2025, two-founder teams were the most common type, at 36% overall and 40% in SaaS.4

There is some good news for solo founders. Once a solo founder closes a priced round, Carta's data shows their valuation and dilution are statistically the same as a team's.8 Solo founders also hire their first employee sooner, at a median of 399 days after incorporation compared with 480 for multi-founder companies.2 The data suggests the main obstacle is getting to a funding round at all. Solo founders who get there are not penalized on price. That fits a world where many solo businesses are profitable, self-funded companies that never planned to raise venture money.

The one-person unicorn still hasn't arrived

The most widely repeated claim in this area is the prediction of a billion-dollar company run by one person. Sam Altman has talked about a betting pool among tech CEOs on when it will happen.15 Inc. reported that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei gave it a 70 to 80% chance of happening as early as 2026.12

How close anyone has come depends on who is telling it. PYMNTS, citing The New York Times, ran a headline saying the one-person billion-dollar company "is here." It pointed to Medvi, a telehealth company founded by Matthew Gallagher that it said reached $401 million in its first year.19 Accounts of Medvi's future disagree. One describes it as on track for a $1.8 billion valuation.15 Another describes $1.8 billion as a 2026 revenue projection.16 Medvi is also not entirely a one-person operation: Gallagher hired his brother after the first year.15 Startup Fortune's October analysis says flatly that no verified one-person unicorn exists. It also warns that most numbers in circulation come from promotional blogs.12 The best-documented solo exit is still Base44, which Wix bought for $80 million in cash in June 2025, about six months after it launched.12

The best-documented evidence supports Startup Fortune's view. Revenue is not valuation, and Medvi sells compounded GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Even a supportive account says Medvi's future depends more on that drug market than on AI tools.15 The Medvi story also shows a risk the hype tends to skip. Its customer-service chatbot reportedly made up drug prices, which the company honored, and listed products that did not exist. Both had to be fixed by hand. As PYMNTS noted, that leaves the founder as the only human safety net for every mistake.19

The founders themselves pay a cost too. One founder-wellbeing publication cites survey data showing that 72% of founders say their work has hurt their mental health. It argues that removing co-founders and staff takes away the people who would notice when someone is struggling.13

Analysis: the real story is many small businesses, not one giant

The solo shift is real and appears to be lasting, but it is mostly not about unicorns. Startup formation has changed: more than a third of new U.S. startups now begin with one person.4 The money has not followed at the same pace.1 App stores are crowded, and older products still earn most of the revenue.24 The likely outcome is a large group of small, profitable solo businesses, mostly bringing in thousands to a few hundred thousand dollars a year, with a small number of breakout successes. Even advocates of the model now argue that a one-person company earning $1 million with full ownership can beat a venture-backed company where the founder owns 8%.15 The first verified one-person unicorn would be a big headline. The broader change is that starting a company alone has become an ordinary choice.